The Man Who Kept the Secrets; Richard Helms & the CIA

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Third Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xv, 393, [1] pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ somewhat soiled, DJ has wear, soiling, small tears and chips. DJ has some staining. Minor staining to cover. Thomas Powers (New York City, December 12, 1940) is an American author and intelligence expert. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 together with Lucinda Franks for his articles on Weatherman member Diana Oughton (1942-1970). He was also the recipient of the Olive Branch award in 1984 for a cover story on the Cold War that appeared in The Atlantic, a 2007 Berlin Prize, and for his 2010 book on Crazy Horse the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. At first he worked for the Rome Daily American in Italy, later for United Press International. In 1970 he became a freelance writer. Powers is the author of six works of nonfiction and one novel. His The Man who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979) is "widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on the subject of intelligence." His work on Werner Heisenberg tracks secret developments in nuclear physics during the 1930s and early 1940s. The revised edition of his Intelligence Wars contains twenty-eight articles previously published in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review from 1983 to 2004. His most recent book follows the life of Crazy Horse (died Nebraska 1877). Evan Thomas in The New York Times, while reviewing this book, also commented broadly on Powers as an author and a previous work on Richard Helms. Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 - October 23, 2002) was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. As a professional, Helms highly valued information gathering (favoring the interpersonal, but including the technical, obtained by espionage or from published media) and its analysis while prizing counterintelligence. Although a participant in planning such activities, Helms remained a skeptic about covert and paramilitary operations. Helms understood the bounds of the agency role as being able to express strong opinions over a decision under review, yet working as a team player once a course was set by the administration. It was the duty of the DCI to keep official secrets from press scrutiny. While working as the DCI, Helms managed the agency following the lead of his predecessor John McCone. In 1977, as a result of earlier covert operations in Chile, Helms became the only DCI convicted of misleading Congress. Helms last post in government service was Ambassador to Iran from 1973 to 1977. Besides, Helms was a key witness before the Senate during its investigation of the CIA by the Church Committee in the mid-1970s. Richard Helms is the quintessential CIA man. For thirty years--from the very inception of the Central Intelligence Agency and before--he occupied pivotal positions in that shadowy world: OSS operator, spymaster, planner and plotter, and, finally, for more than six years, Agency director. No other man was so closely and personally involved, over so long a period, with so many CIA activities, successful and otherwise. His story is the story of the CIA, and in portraying Helms's extraordinary career Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Powers has in fact written the first comprehensive inside history of the CIA itself. It is a history, moreover, that is entirely uncensored. While the information on which it is based has been drawn from intensive interviews with dozens of former key Agency officials, including Helms himself, as well as from exhaustive research through hundreds of published and unpublished sources, the author is not subject to the kind of legal restraints that have burdened others writing about the CIA. The result is a picture of the Agency more objective, more complete, and more revealing than any hitherto available. And because it is written with an eye for character and anecdote, it is as readable as it is important. Here too are the personalities that created and shaped the CIA: Frank Wisner, one of Helms's executive predecessors, being treated for a nervous breakdown and warning a nurse, "I control thousands of goons!"; Allen Dulles telling his favorite story, about passing up yet another boring interview with yet another fanatical Russian exile in Switzerland during World War I--and later finding out that it had been Lenin; the odd genius of Richard Bissell, who triumphantly created the U-2 high-level reconnaissance program--and then superintended the Bay of Pigs fiasco; James Angleton, the man who raised suspicion to an art form as counterintelligence chief; E. Howard Hunt, the maverick undercover man, who, when asked by an old CIA colleague what he was doing in Nixon's White House, replied, "Well, you know, political work"--And many more. At the center of it all is Richard Helms, "the man who kept the secrets," who at the end of his long career found himself charged with perjury for doing what he conceived to be his job, lying to a Senate investigating committee As this book makes clear, the dilemma of Richard Helms is not his alone, but a conflict of principle in many ways inherent in the Agency itself, and in a society that insists on creating such an institution and then letting it go its way. With the publication of this book, we are at last in a position to see, to understand, and to judge the CIA.--Dust jacket.